Pakistan_ A Hard Country - Anatol Lieven [63]
THE COURTS
Suspects in Pakistan who survive investigation by the police find themselves before the courts – and may the Lord have mercy on their souls. ‘May God save even my worst enemy from disease and a court case,’ as a Punjabi saying has it. At least as bad as the problem of corruption is that of delay. Indeed, if there is a classical legal phrase that ought to be nailed above every Pakistani (and Indian) courtroom, and perhaps to the foreheads of South Asian judges and lawyers, it is ‘Justice Delayed is Justice Denied.’ When I visited the city courts in Quetta, Balochistan, a majority of the people with whom I spoke outside had cases which had been pending for more than five years, and had spent more than Rs200,000 on legal fees and bribes – a colossal sum for a poor man in Pakistan.
These problems do not apply only to court cases. One old man had had to come every day for six days, despite paying several bribes, simply in order to get a property transfer registered. This means that a great many people, especially in the countryside, prefer to arrange all such transfers and inheritance arrangements informally – which means that there can then be no recourse to official law if things go wrong.
The inordinate length of time taken by South Asian legal cases is in part related to corruption, but also to a host of other factors in which local influence and intimidation, lack of staff, a grossly overloaded system, cynical manoeuvres by lawyers, and sheer laxness, laziness and incompetence on the part of both the judiciary and the police all play a part.
Moreover, of course, delay breeds overloading and overloading breeds more delay, in a sort of horrible legal combination of circulus vitiosus and perpetuum mobile (to use two Latin phrases that might usefully replace those legal ones so beloved of South Asian lawyers). As of May 2009, there were more than 100,000 cases pending before the Karachi city courts alone, with 110 judges to try them (in a city of some 17 million people) – which makes for an easy enough calculation. Some of the courts are supposed on paper to attend to more than 100 cases a day. Every day, around 1,200 prisoners should be delivered to the courts in Karachi, but there are only vehicles and holding cells for 500.
To deal with the issue of Pakistani delays in the way that the English legal system (belatedly and in part) improved the almost equally dreadful state of the law in early nineteenth-century England would require the isolation of particular causes. That is hard to do, because there are so many causes, and the legitimate (or at least unavoidable) and the illegitimate are so mixed up together. A central problem is the scandalous number of adjournments, of which it is not at all uncommon to encounter several dozen in one single case.
An adjournment may be given for any number of reasons, including it seems for no reason at all except that one or other lawyer asks for it. And these reasons may be legitimate (for example, there really is an acute shortage of vehicles to bring prisoners from jail to court) or may be the product of corruption, influence, intimidation, personal friendship or just the easygoing attitude to members of their own class that characterizes most of South Asian officialdom. As a retired judge told me:
It doesn’t do for a judge to be too hard with the lawyers. We all know each other and there is a sort of family feeling in the legal profession. And a judge who makes himself really unpopular with the lawyers will find his promotion blocked by rumours and whispers, or may even be accused of corruption, rightly or wrongly. So many judges take a live-and-let-live attitude when they really ought to be pulling a lot of lawyers up very hard indeed, especially